Sedition Machines

EXPERIMENTS IN MISTRANSLATION

This collection brings together poetry produced at intervals since Spring 2011. Containing poems inspired by Birch Bark Letters of Medieval Novgorod, lyrics from the Late Roman era, and early Korean hyangga, Seditions builds upon and interrogates the Anglo-American Modernist tradition of translation that began with Ezra Pound.

PUBLICATIONS

Pulgasari: 7 Korean Hyangga (e-book) — Intercapillary Spaces (2012).

“Pervigilium Veneris” (poem) — VLAK: international issue (2013).

“Fortuna” (poem) — This Corner, ed. Mengham & Kinsella (2011).

“Consolation”, “Metaphysical” (two poems) — HiZero5, ed. Luna (2011).

Sedition Machines was published by Veer Books in 2017, and can be purchased here. The Pulgasari sequence can be downloaded in its entirety for free here.

REVIEWS

“In the crossing of duplicity and revolution there are vestiges of linguistic forms which come into our mouths, but when we try to speak them, only splinters are left on the tongue. These sequences try to speak urgently of the law only to find that to do so is to speak twice over oneself as multiple scripts combine. Languages have transformed life at the widest scale: Ashford looks to follow those places where the transmutable lies within the power play of the merely translatable – in order to rewrite what happened next or expose what the hybrid word for word systems of containment couldn’t quite void.”